Then
The first time I phase, I’m six years old.
It happens on a market day. A cluster of bigger, older kids—greenhorns fixing to get recruited by the Gold Town Gang—come after me. Just to bully. Just to take their anger out on someone smaller than themselves.
I hide in a dark corner of an alley, trembling, expecting at any second to feel rough fingers grab my hair or my arms and drag me into the open. I want to disappear and become a shadow again. I stare at the rooftop and wish and wish I could be up there instead.
Everything goes dead silent. The sounds of Covenant disappear. The world around me becomes a smear of color and light and shadow.
And then I’m there, crouching on the rooftop in the exact spot I’d been staring at, my breath coming in short gasps, my skin crawling with a buzzing, prickling sensation. Like I’m made from air and lightning. And maybe I am. It feels possible in this moment. Anything feels possible in this moment.
The first thing I do is run and tell Orion.
I find him stretched out on the roof of our rickety boardinghouse, eyes closed as he soaks up the warm sunshine. I tell him everything that happened, show him what I can do, and I’m so proud, so excited to be special—really special.
But Orion isn’t excited. His face collapses like a falling star, dragged down by shock and worry.
But … Doesn’t that mean you’re a saint?
A saint.
Legends. Holy figures. Gifted with special abilities for the glory of the Heralds and taken to the Gate of Heaven to serve their divine purpose.
I remember seeing one on the dailies a year ago.
A kid like me. Papa had said she’d run away after her parents told the chapels, but Archangels still found her, four days later. What was her name?
Sorcha. Sorcha Tannith. She’d had the brightest red hair I’d ever seen.
Couldn’t be, I tell him. I’m a duster.
Everyone knows you can only become a saint if you’re storm-touched. And the only ones who are ever storm-touched are skyliners, like Sorcha. They live up in the clouds on dirigibles and homesteads, where the magnastorms are, and keep all the blessings of the Heralds to themselves.
I pick at the dry skin of my lips, frowning. I should tell Mama and Papa.
Don’t. Orion grabs both my hands, squeezing them. Don’t tell them, V. If anyone finds out what you can do, the Archangels will take you away. We won’t see each other ever again.
All the excitement starts to trickle from my belly. I hadn’t thought about that part. About being taken, snatched away from Mama and Papa and little Halle and Orion by towering metal figures that burned black and gold.
I stare into Orion’s big, dark eyes. Sometimes I feel safer with him than with anyone else, even Mama and Papa.
Because Mama and Papa walk around heavy with worries, the kinds of worries that leave little bits and pieces everywhere, that cling sticky to my skin no matter what I do, weighing me down.
Orion doesn’t have anything like that. I can just be myself around him, light and fast and free.
I twist my hands in his grip, interlacing our fingers. Okay. I won’t tell anyone.
And you can’t do it again, he adds. In case someone sees.
I nod. I won’t, I swear.
We lie down on the roof together, side by side, our arms touching, our hands still joined even when keeping them clasped together has made them all sweaty.
We watch the shifting dirigibles and homesteads cluttering the sky above us and make up increasingly wild stories about the skyliners who live there until the sun starts to dip toward the horizon.
I don’t phase again after that, not even when the ache to do so floods my whole body, building underneath my skin like an itch I can never scratch.
I keep my promise.
Until eight years later, when I’m standing in front of my first kill.